A variety of applications present data that exceeds an available display area of the application user interface. One approach to handle this is the scrollbar utilized commonly by different kinds of user interfaces. For example, pages of data that can be viewed by scrolling up or down using various controls such as a keyboard, a mouse, and the like with the scrollbar providing a feedback regarding where in the overall amount of data the user is. The viewable data may include text, graphics, combination of the two, etc.
In a networked environment, an application may attempt to download the entire amount of data to present to a user before presenting it in its user interface. This approach may be infeasible by causing unacceptable delays in presentation of data to the user if the data is large, available bandwidth is small, or other system resources cause limitation in the downloading of the data from a server. Another alternative approach is downloading the data in groups and updating the user interface as data is downloaded. However, this approach may also result in “clunkiness” in the system, where the presented data may show up in pieces, delays may annoy the user, and the system resources may be unnecessarily occupied with downloading the whole data when the user may be interested only in a particular piece of it. Another challenge with conventional systems is the fact that typical scrolling attempts to “seek to” a specific record based on a percentage operation, which can be a system stressing operation.